


Jasper Writes A Great American Novel

by NavyRuby



Series: Jasper Does Stuff: The Reckoning [3]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Self indulgent headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 12:37:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7845226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NavyRuby/pseuds/NavyRuby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Dramatic quote by a famous author here)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jasper Writes A Great American Novel

**Author's Note:**

> This one isn't super good I feel, but it does have a headcanon that's very dear to me so...

The moon was a strange constant on Earth; Shining it’s consistent brightness throughout wars and disasters alike. Or was that the sun? Wasn’t there something about phases of the moon? Jasper didn’t know, couldn’t be bothered to remember.

She had missed the moon.

It was a kinship that she held with no other. The moon, being made for the Earth yet simultaneously not. Being held back from living on the planet that it was meant for. Or at least those were Jasper’s feelings.

God, the atmosphere here must be making her head go screwy…She hadn’t had these many mushy thoughts since her time in the war. When she was shattering gems there was a lot of misguided ‘feelings’ and ‘sentiments’ that had been running through her head. None of which were appropriate for the situation or any situation there after.

However odd a quartz being a writer at heart was didn’t change how often it apparently happened. Before Jasper’s service her and her squad mates were handed out ‘coping’ journals: intended for the more sensitive bunch, given out by a judgemental Hematite. A disclaimer on the front declared that this should be where they dump their idle thoughts lest they have them.

Most quartzes stuffed these books into their gems and didn’t say anything about it afterwards, a small amount of them taking it out during the hours of the night on Earth when the fighting had seemed to all but halt for the crying of the crickets. Jasper was one of them, sneakily making sure she was alone in her quarters before taking a quill to the page.

At first she tried to have the thing thrown away, sliding it into the weekly trash pile that would be taken and dumped into the used up quarry. Unfortunately the clean up crews sense of duty had been too strong and they were determined to give back any and all lost items, mostly in fear of being punished for throwing away a high ranking quartz’s possessions.

Then Jasper had tried to burn it, resulting in only the outside bindings to retain a slight singe on them. Why was everything made by homeworld built to last? Can’t they have some kind of third party crew making these things what were all those planets they held captive for if not menial tasks such as this?

Jasper had been stuck with the ‘gift’. She knew she shouldn’t complain about free things but since when did a Perfect Quartz like her ever have to pay for something in the first place? There was also the small fact that if one didn’t take out the journal in a completely secluded area it was like shapeshifting into a target for other quartzes to beat on. As far as the other warriors were concerned, a writer with ‘feelings’ and ‘thoughts’ didn’t belong in their bunks.

Sighing, the orange gem settled herself deeper into the grassy hill, her eyes still locked with the moon. That whole ordeal was long ago anyways. And, even though she did end up using the journal when she needed it, she didn’t even know where the thing was nowadays.

“Good fucking riddance,” Jasper said, content to leave the past in the past.

-

Peridot scrambled on all fours into the barn, holding a small, pink, leather bound notebook, “You will not Believe what I found, Lapis!”

“Was it my will to live?” The water gem barely looked up from issue four of Pretty Hairstylist. She was pretty used to Peridot’s random outbursts over junk by now.

“JASPER’S DIARY!!!” Peridot squeaked.

Lapis looked up then back down at her manga. Was it really worth not finishing Kiosuke’s character arc just to make fun of Jasper?

  
Yes, of course it was.

“Where did you find it?” Lapis settled down on the floor next to Peridot who was excitedly jittering and holding the book close to her chest.

“It was out back, you know where we keep the old parts from the hand ship crash? I was lookin through trying to find some Inspiration for my next piece and THERE IT WAS sitting all swaggy lookin’ on a pile of Jasper’s stuff!” She explained all this with the diary’s lock held firmly between her sharp teeth.

“You really need to stop copying Amethyst so much…” Lapis was ignored as Peridot finally broke open the diary’s lock.

Peridot cried out in satisfaction, “Finally, SOMETHING that I can use against Jasper. She’s so emotionally impenetrable it’s almost worrying.”

Lapis silently watched as Peridot skimmed through the pages of Jasper’s most inner thoughts laid out before her.

         _24th day of the newest moon_

_I lay here trembling beneath the moon’s glow. Battles of the past, ones that can never be revisited, still torturing my sleepless mind._

_If I had need of sleep that is._

_I would almost prefer to be a human at this point. Sleeping whenever I can not control the demon tongues lapping at my consciousness._

Peridot broke off her reading, “Demon’s tongues, moon’s glow? What?”

Lapis sat beside her listening intently, “Cool…” She murmured into her fist.

The green gem turned, flapping the book aggressively, “It’s not supposed to be cool! It’s supposed to be full of really revealing things about Jasper and how much she fails to grasp at the basic inner workings of the mind.”

“What?”

“About how she sucks at Writing for shards sake! Every single report she would give back to me was filled with spelling and grammar mistakes on even the most basic of sentences!! It was like she was trying to use me as some kind of living spell check or something,” Peridot grumbled and began flipping through pages with a renewed passion, “There’s gotta be something like that in here…”

         _30th day of the half moon_

_My head aches as I pen this, the quill throbbing beneath my hands. To say we were woefully unprepared for a hit such as that would be near blasphemy to our diamond._

_It had come swiftly and without warning, the screaming of renegades and former soldiers alike._

_I had fought to the very extent of all I could give and still that was not enough._

_Casualties: Nearly two hundred of my entire platoon. Gone._

_I’m in rem-_ UGH

Peridot started flipping again, the journal still gripping Lapis’ full attention.

         _40th day of the newest moon_

_I lay in my bunk, remembering the gleam of Pink Diamond’s gem._

_If I am not careful of my memories, there shall be no sleep for me or my dorm mates as just the cursory glance that I had of her still brightens my demeanor enough for it to shine through and into my dorm._

_Her gem- oh stars her gem...no sword ever wielded could come close to the sparkling of it and no sword thereafter will match it._

Peridot slumped back dropping the book on the wooden floor, defeated.

“This is like Jasper didn’t even write it!”

“Her reports couldn’t have been that bad if she can do this,” Lapis piped up, already trying to skim through what Peridot had skipped.

“You don’t know though! You weren’t there!!” Peridot was back to standing and gesturing around, taken over by something other than an anger at being wrong, “She once spelled my name Peridit! That’s not my name!”

“Mistakes happen,” Lapis had started reading from the beginning observing the age on the diary, it had to be at least a thousand years old, “Maybe she was purposefully making them.”

“What? Just to mess with me?” Peridot stood still then scrubbed her face with her hands, “Of course she was that’s totally a Jasper thing to do, UGH I hate her,” Peridot slunked towards the entrance of the barn, her posture downtrodden.

“Where are you going?” Lapis disinterestedly asked, not looking up from her new form of literature.

“To mess with more of Jasper’s things.”

Both gems spent the night doing exactly that, Peridot throwing Jasper’s stuff that hadn’t been ruined in the crash into a large box labeled ‘traitor’ and Lapis having long forgotten Kisuke’s arc in her manga in favor for historical non-fiction.

Kiosuke would just have to forgive her.

-

Jasper walked into the Beach City Mall holding Steven and Connie’s hands tightly. She had been informed earlier from Pearl that there were many dangerous humans that lurked in places like ‘Malls’ and although Steven and Connie were soldiers trained by the quartz herself, Jasper still worried.

“You can let go of us Jasper, no one’s going to mess with us with you around,” Connie said, feeling a little too old to be doted on like this.

“Pearl said you can never know with humans. I am just as wary of your kind as I am in awe of it.”

Steven clapped one hand over his cheek and looked up adoringly at Jasper, “Aww, you’re in awe of us!”

Jasper looked up to hide her flustered cheeks, “Don’t tell Garnet I said that.”

Both kids began dragging her around the mall, patrons parting from Jasper’s mere size and stature, whispering about her behind her back. It was flattering, if not a bit paranoia inducing, but Jasper was paying more attention to what the kids were going on about,

“We should go by the toy store-”

“Then the book store-”

“And finally,” They both geared up, “THE FOOD COURT!”

Their trip through the mall hadn’t been very eventful, for Jasper at least. The kids had had fun with the toystore’s floor piano and touching literally everything in the mall. When they got to the book place (barn something Jasper forgot) Steven had bought four issues of a comic series about something called a Hairstylist and Connie purchased a rather thick looking book called ‘The Years of War’.

The differences in these two were heartwarming, and, if Jasper was honest, a little confusing. Maybe she just wasn’t ‘up’ with what the kids were into nowadays or whatever.

“Hey Jasper, have you noticed people whispering about you?” Steven said with a mouth full of sub sandwich.

“Pearl doesn’t want you chewing with your mouth open,” Jasper reminded the boy who had sheepishly stopped talking to swallow his meal.

“I think you’re avoiding the question, this could be something important,” Connie leered around their area, looking for suspicious mall goers.

Jasper chuckled, flexing her muscles through the pink sleeves of her polo shirt, “There’s nothing to be worried about, they’re probably just admiring what I got. Nothin’ new.”

Both kids rolled their eyes at Jasper’s blatant lack of modesty.

They were about to let the subject drop when a pale faced woman with a flustered demeanour walked up to their table, looking at Jasper with wide, fearful, eyes, “I-is your name...Jasper Q. Uartz by any chance?”

“It’s just Jasper actually...How do you know who I am?” The quartz was used to being recognized on Homeworld and while there was no doubt that word of her absolute perfection had spread around the city she wasn’t accustomed to humans actually knowing her name.

The woman looked away as if she had the air taken out of her, “Oh my gosh it’s actually her aaahh,,,” She looked back to Jasper, a little more than just star struck, “You’re one of my biggest inspirations as a writer- I mean the world you’ve been able to put together is just so...It’s so...Amazing! Can you sign this for me,” The woman pulled out the same large book that Connie had bought earlier and a pen, holding them out in front of Jasper.

Connie and Steven looked on in confusion as Jasper took the small pen between her large fingers and began scribbling her name on the cover.

The woman did, what looked to be, a little dance of joy, and left without another thing said. She didn’t even take her pen back.

Connie looked up at Jasper with starry eyes, “You never told us you were an author before!”

“That’s because I didn’t know I was one, kid,” Jasper took the pen from between her fingers and tucked it behind her ear, “I’ve never written a damn thing in my whole life, I don’t know what that human was going on about.”

“Guys look at this!” Steven said, shaking excitedly in his seat. He too had recognized the book the woman held out and had digged it out of their shopping bag. Steven pointed to the cover that had ‘written by Jasper Q. Uartz’ scrawled in dramatic cursive.

“It says it right there it has to be you!”

“Must be some other Q. Uartz, I would never write something called ‘The Years of War’. I wouldn’t even write anything!” Jasper said the book title with some disgust. The whole thing sounded like a bad romance novel for sappy humans and weaker gems to look at when they missed their partners.

The proverbial light of an idea ignited over Connie’s head, “We can just look at the author’s section.”

The three crowded together around the table, breaths baited. In the author’s section was a picture of Jasper taken while she had been resting and a small blurb underneath that said,

‘This book was a bunch of lost potential and nothing could possibly go wrong if I just hand it over to my publisher and say “Hey Lapis it’d be cool if you published this” so here I am.’

Steven raised an eyebrow in question, “Lapis?”

Jasper grit her teeth, “Lapis…I don’t know what this is but it can’t be anything good if-”

“Day of the 10th half moon, there was far fewer than my own at this meeting of the Quartzes. I couldn’t help but feel displaced in the crowd. With so few Jaspers and Perfect gems to surround myself with, my stone heart began to beat with longing-”

“NO!” Jasper cut Connie off, picking the book from her small hands and tossing it far across the bustling mall.

Jasper’s outburst had caused the mall to stop and look at her for a second before they resumed walking, a cry of ‘hey free book!’ came from the general direction of the tossed item.

Jasper put her head in her hands, her mood dampened by having her old embarrassing writing distributed to the public, “I can’t believe this…”

Steven and Connie put sympathetic hands on Jasper’s tree trunk sized arms, “It’s probably super good!,” Steven said with all the hope he could muster in his little squishy body.

“Yeah! I mean, it doesn’t seem so bad? A lot of people seem to like it, I mean you already have one fan!” Connie tried to reassure Jasper by playing towards her ego. It didn’t work.

“I’m a Quartz, I was never supposed to be an ‘author’,” Jasper spit the word out, “I was supposed to stay in line and fight, writing in private only. No one should know about this.”

Steven looked around at the now growing crowd of fans that had been attracted by the previous woman’s rantings, all saying some variation of ‘it’s actually her’ and ‘she looks just like she did in her picture!’

“Uhhh guys, maybe we should go back home and ask Lapis about this?” His anxious voice startling Jasper out of her existential crisis.

The Quartz shot up from her chair, pushing it back a few feet. Her hands slammed down on the table creating hairline cracks in it.

“Lapis Lazuli…” She said with a measured and dark tone.

-

Back at the barn Lapis sneezed.

Peridot looked up from the t.v, “Do you have a cold? I know that’s impossible but i’m asking for posterity’s sake.”

There was an inexplicable chill in their home but even if it was from the breeze coming through the open door, both gems knew it would be incredibly unlikely to come down with a pathetic human sickness like a cold.

“Nah,” Lapis wiped her nose before going back to her current meep morp, a mobile with the original copy of Jasper’s journal and the first published copy balancing on the ends, “Someone must be talking about me I guess,”

With a barely calculated swipe, Lapis impaled the royalty check she got from the publishing company on a stick she found outside, connecting it to the mobile with a piece of string.

“Finished,” The water gem stood back and crossed her arms, already picking apart what could be different about the mobile.

“I like the contrast between the old and new copies,” Peridot got up from the couch to appraise her roommates’ art, “What’d you call it?”

Lapis paused, laying a finger thoughtfully to her chin before answering,

“I call it, ‘Orange Fury’.”

“Why would you call it that-”

A deep rumbling akin to a giant walking on hollow earth could be heard in the distance, a growling roar of ‘Lazuli’ resonated throughout both Peridot and the water gems forms.

“Oh."


End file.
